Military Remains The Only Intact Soviet Institution

THE HAGUE — Civilian control of the military is now an issue in the Soviet Union, where it was never a problem before. In the past, military subordination to government and ruling Communist Party was not only a matter of principle but was enforced by the system of political commissars in the army, parallel to the army command structure, which originated with Trotsky in the civil war.

Today the disintegration of party and state authority leaves the army the only solid all-union structure that survives in the Soviet Union. It is a socially and nationally integrated force with an officer corps that considers the army guarantor of constitutional order. Military industry remains the working part of the Soviet industrial economy, otherwise in decomposition as a consequence of Mikhail Gorbachev`s structural reform projects, which have been foundering in incoherence and indecision.

The Western debate over aid to the Soviet Union considers mainly the civilian economy. But the military control the high-technology industrial sector and remain the biggest single consumer of the nation`s production and resources.

Mikhail Gorbachev himself has acknowledged that the Soviet Union has

``the most militarized economy in the world and the largest defense expenditures,`` still consuming, according to him (speaking in 1990), some 18 percent of Soviet national income. Others, of course, put that figure even higher. Thus the military establishment itself is an enormous obstacle to that redeployment of resources essential to successful reform-as well as to the success of any program of foreign aid.

At the same time the army finds itself with a humiliatingly reversed professional mission. Defender for the past 40 years of an East European defensive glacis that reached beyond Berlin to the Elbe River, the army during the last two years has been compelled to carry out a unilateral withdrawal, subsidized by its former enemies, yielding positions conquered at atrocious cost during the Second World War.

Its mission today increasingly is an internal one, a development of considerable political import for the Soviet Union. It now defends the political order-what remains of it-repressing separatists and autonomists in the Baltics, the Transcaucasian republics and Moldavia. No army likes political duties of this kind-police work-and the logical reaction is to blame the political leaders who have brought army and country to such a pass.

Russian Army officers also experience a devastating loss of social standing and respect, and even of economic security, as a consequence of the country`s crisis and the East European and East German withdrawals. Sergey Rogov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, reports that last year there were more than 173,000 officers without official housing in the Soviet Union. Thirty-thousand more now are arriving from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and, eventually, from Poland. Sixty-three thousand military families and 13,000 unmarried officers are returning from East Germany.

The German government is building housing in the Soviet Union for these returning troops as part of its program of aid to the retreating Russians, to expedite their retreat-a bizarre transaction, itself humiliating to the Soviet officer corps. However, Germany`s assistance still is not enough, and proposals have been made that the other Western powers put up still more funds.

This, coming at a time when the United States is asking its allies to pay for its own military redeployment in a new role as guarantor of international order, presents the bizarre prospect of both ``superpowers`` being subsidized by the Western allies, allowing them to maintain military establishments geared to levels of mutual deterrence of slight relevance today. The Soviet subsidy, however, may be a cheap price to pay for removing Soviet power from Central and Eastern Europe-considering the alternative.

Rogov was one of the Soviet participants in a meeting just held at The Hague under the auspices of the Netherlands Foreign and Defense Ministries and the Netherlands Atlantic Commission, comparing the workings of Western systems of parliamentary control of the military with those which are emerging-or failing to emerge in a satisfactory way, as in the Soviet Union-in the formerly communist countries in the East.